When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, Barack Obama was only seven.
Today, 41 years later, America pauses to honor King on his birthday.
Every year, we look back to celebrate King’s brilliance and honor the way his pacifist push for equal rights planted a revolution in slow-release at the very core of America. Since then, the country has gone through a gradual but steady change of heart - and head – without erupting, except for a few cases, into violence or disorder.
But this year, as we look back to celebrate King, we look forward, too – to President-elect Obama’s presidency. The excitement in the air around Washington, D.C. is so real, you can almost breathe it.
At 48, Obama is roughly 10 years older then King when he died at 39. Raised in post-Civil Rights America, Obama came of age in an era when King’s forward-thinking message of inclusion began to take root. King’s powerful 1960’s vision opened up the space in the 1970’s American imagination necessary to allow Black young people all over the country to begin to gain more access to the schools, jobs and programs that were crucial in the Black middle class expansion of the 1970s.
In several key ways, Obama’s election to the presidency, exactly 40 years after King's death, fulfills the race-neutral vision Martin Luther King laid out for the future of the country. Nothing short of Obama’s “content of character” – that is his preparation, persistence and personality - reassured Americans that electing a Black Man with a foreign father, unconventional name and non-traditional family history was the right decision.
But that’s just the beginning of Obama’s fulfillment of King’s dream.
Obama’s progressive ideas and the practical public policy plans in which they will come alive, have the full potential to shape a future for America that is similar in substance to the one King imagined. In fact, King couldn’t ask for a smarter and more persuasive torchbearer to champion his Dream.
Obama’s outspoken and principled criticism of the Iraq War will likely translate into super-smart, tough and flexible U.S. foreign and military policy. Then, when war is waged, it will be backed by a rationale that has enough guns to stand up to the censure King expressed in his anti-war “Call to Conscience” speech.
Obama’s push for an aggressive stimulus plan promises to lift millions of poor and working class Americans to middle class stability. This initiative will afford families with basic economic and financial security in the way King hoped his Poor People’s Campaign would.
Obama, a Constitutional law professor, grounds many of his arguments in the U.S. Constitition. King did this, too. In his famous I have a Dream speech, he reached back, "When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.
And Obama’s call for all races to look past “the things that divide us” echoes Martin Luther King’s much-repeated belief that character, not race, should determine the way we judge others.
Now, the challenge falls in the hands of regular people to keep the 44th president true to his campaign promises. Through direct support and pressure on elected officials, voters everywhere must hold the new president to the highest standards. And in our private lives, we must make changes and contribute to things that bring the new president's - and King before him - vision to reality.
With the legacy of King behind us and Obama’s road to “Change” before us, a clear path has been set for the renewal of America. Get on it.